


The Third Sphere of Heaven

by idiotequed



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Austen derivative af, Betrayal, Cameos, Edinburgh, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Gen, Mary and Richard Woodhull cameo, Slow Build, Slow Burn, seriously the slowest i'm so sorry, the Scottish Enlightenment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4358309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiotequed/pseuds/idiotequed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“…shaken still with love of her, yet took the course heaven gave him…” Or:</p>
<p>In Spring 1779, Major Hewlett abruptly resigned his commission and returned to Scotland. Varied rumors circulated, but gossip preferred a single cause:  Anna Strong.  Years passed, wars were over and Anna was certain never to meet him again. She could hardly expect, of course, to come into a inheritance left by a distant relation in the British isles. When it happened however she found herself seeking the assistance of Mr. Edmund Hewlett of Edinburgh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Third Sphere of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> This is 99% due and thanks to Freddy. Freddy knows who Freddy is.

_"conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma"_

—Dante

  


_1779_  


  


  
On an otherwise unremarkable day in May, Major Hewlett rode out from Setauket accompanied by an escort and a carriage of his sundry effects. The weather kept fair and it looked as though the entirety of the town turned out to bid him farewell, less so than had the three days prior to greet the officer who purchased his commission, the stolid Captain Ferguson. Hewlett seemed surprised by the numbers, to judge by the wideness of his eyes, and equal parts moved, to judge by the shine of them and the frequency with which he blinked. Perhaps it prompted him to words unplanned, for there could be nothing rehearsed in his long, grasping silence as he gazed over the crowd. More evidence lay in the brevity of what he finally voiced, without quotation or importance, without any balancing upon the stilts of king and country. 

Strained and overcome, Hewlett managed only to thank Setauket for its long welcome and to confess that he had, for a good time, begun to consider it as Home.

Such warmed him further to the residents of Setauket, who may have been surprised to find in his last definition for, or close to, the sentiment in their own breasts. A capricious feeling, they had not been so generous when he announced his intentions three weeks past, or throughout the majority of his command, or indeed, in the days, months, and years thereafter, where the expanse of time and the shifting attitudes it carried necessarily reduced him.

However, in that moment, they looked with fond regard and regretted his departure. It did provide a singular positive: of recent untouched by the turmoil of the war, in part if not so widely recognized due to his efforts, Setauket found in the subject of his leaving ample material for discussion. It remained the chief subject well into June, when reports from battle superseded. 

  


\--

  


Two weeks before Major Hewlett rode for New York harbor, and one following his disclosure to the town, Mary Woodhull found herself pressed for every and any detail by the women as they sewed. 

“I couldn’t say,” she deferred, but Lydia Ketcham did insist:

“You mean you _won’t_ say, oh, that is too unkind, and as much confirmation.” 

“Confirmation of what? You misunderstand me. I couldn’t say because I do not know.”

Lydia looked at Rachel Clark with significance. Rachel protested:

“But you _live_ here, Mary, you must have some idea. Why should he go? Whyever now, when he wouldn’t after his dreadful capture, and not after the troubles with Captain Simcoe?”

“Now,” added Lydia, her mouth curving, “if he were the sort he first seemed—“

“Oh yes,” laughed Rachel, “I wouldn’t have been at all surprised, not for a moment, had he gone running after losing all those men so soon after Captain Joyce—“

Mary frowned down at her stitching, the movement of her fingers slowing. 

“Tragedy,” Rachel rushed, “all of it so terrible, that is, a lesser man, even an officer of the King’s army, might be quite discouraged, and with Lt. Colonel Rogers following still, I’m afraid he didn’t look terribly capable, and all that _before_ he—“

Mary exclaimed, the pricking of her finger serving as interruption. She dismissed their concern, but after another exchange of glances between the two, Lydia finished for them, reclaiming a degree of respect, cradled by gentle suggestion.

“It is only that he has, after all, proved himself so good and steadfast, that we cannot make any sense of it.”

“I can only relate what I have already: he means to return to help his brother in the recovery of the estate.”

“Oh, but why now?” Rachel demanded. “If his family could spare him this long, why not until the finish?” 

“He offered scarce else and though no less amiable than he ever was, his tone quite forbade further.”

As did Mary’s, at that. They fell three into a discontent and hungry quiet, with Mary determined in her needle, and Lydia and Rachel engaged in an animated debate through their eyes. They lasted in this way for five and ten minutes, until it could no longer be borne. 

“We mustn’t avoid it longer as it is deceptive and unseemly,” Rachel declared, placing down her sewing. “I have a notion—that is, I have _heard_ it said, that it must be due to Mrs. Strong, our own Anna.” 

“If only she were able to escape her labor this hour, we might have entreated her directly,” Lydia rightly added, pert conviction in her mouth.

Mary grimaced, unable to soften the contortion, but keeping her doubt on her tongue and between her teeth. She swallowed and did not observe their deliberate selection of just this time for their circle. Lydia, too, abandoned her stitches.

“As if it is true, what _they_ say, then her heart must be troubled, and we must console her. Mary, even if they _have_ been duly discreet, you mustn’t pretend to us to have overlooked the change between them over these weeks, not when it is so evident to the whole of Setauket!”

Mary felt the thinning of her patience and her disquiet reflected in the press of her lips. “Please, I pretend nothing.“

“Oh, understand us, it would be to your credit if you did, not out of deceit but decorum, we do grasp it, Mary, but think of poor Anna!” Rachel, swelling with having finally broached the desired speculation, continued, “We have felt, near now two years, that the Major must favor her, indeed it was the first afternoon Anna joined us that we so clearly witnessed it. As unimaginable as it might be that she would not welcome the attentions of such a man, especially when held up against that _Selah Strong_ , we could not judge her reception.“

“Indeed, just as we felt she must feel true warmth, by virtue of assenting to his offer of residence in Whitehall, he was taken and she was out with Simcoe, and in such a fashion!” Lydia seemed no less scandalized by the very notion, however long had since passed. 

Mary paled, could not raise her eyes, and inserted, “I thought—I thought, we were certain, he must have compelled it.”

“Of course, the brute,” Rachel assured, “but at the time, you must agree, it was a confusion and—and a discredit.”

“Poor Anna,” Lydia hastened, glancing at Rachel.

“Poor Anna,” she agreed, “and yet she seemed so close to happiness, which she must deserve more than any. We _had_ been waiting, but they seemed so placid, so slow and content in it, we did begin to wonder if we’d imagined it, ‘til the New Year and those two nascent months. “

“Yes, those—whatever transpired in January, it surely lit a fire beneath them or reduced their caution, as how glaring they became! It was just February when Mrs. Scudder knowingly related that Mrs. DeJong had, weary of her husband’s grousing, confessed that _he_ said not a day passed of Anna’s employment that the Major did not stop with some new and tremendous taste for ale, which, Mr. DeJong did say, was not often finished, and it was all the more of notice by the Major beginning with paltry excuses which he soon abandoned after the first week, and so they went on daily, smiling secret smiles at one another, surely aflutter?”

Lydia exaggerated, but not by much.

“If that were not evidence enough, Ensign Taylor,” billeted with the Clarks, “guaranteed that whatever the temperature, if the night was clear they could be found out at his telescope, ensconced in fur and the glow of their acquaintance!”

Rachel too exaggerated, but not by much.

Lydia thought to close it, presenting the last: “And at least twice a week, they would take their turns through town together, so natural and easy together, such perfect complaisance, such a right _display_ that it felt as anything like an announcement, but then—! Then, every part of it stopped!”

“Ensign Taylor confirmed: each night is all the more temperate, and so many without a cloud, but it has been near two months since they last stood together there. Mrs. Scudder says Mrs. DeJong noted her husband could not discern any change in Anna, little must he have ever noticed, but he _has_ complained of the loss of profit without the Major's frequency.”

“Without since walking once together in town, they confess as much now as they did before, it must be—that is, little wonder _some_ may think: they have divided and he leaves for it.”

Mary stabbed her needle with a singular vehemence, then shook her head at the stretching hole it produced in her fabric. She recognized that her poor reactions would give them greater tinder and strained accordingly to compose herself, to prevent the discord in her from surfacing. It might do, she reflected, to displace it, and give all satisfaction. With such in mind, she lifted her chin, working a watery smile.

“Of course, I have heard it all, and seen them within these walls. It _does_ eat at me—excuse me, please, but I am sure I am the most frustrated by the want to know, in such proximity and yet such mystery. I have offered myself to Anna, but she would not say, she—“

As Mary paused, grasping for a completion that would not taste too foul or dishonest, Rachel swept in.

“I daresay she must be accustomed to managing herself. If they _had_ become confidantes, they’ve now lost one another. Perhaps if we made a concerted effort against—for her, us three together!” 

Mary winced.

“Oh, don’t look so, that is just the idea,” Lydia said. “All the more effective if we are able to insinuate that we already _know_ , have well-guessed it, and so she need not suffer alone to conceal it. I will speculate, I _shall_ , we must tell her and so she must confirm, we _know_ : He must have proposed!”

“Yes! And she must have refused him, shall we think of why, or do you suppose our having cleverly deduced the trouble will loosen her tongue, the main impediment gone?” 

“Only,” Mary attempted, “only Mrs. _Strong_ , you know, she is still married, whatever their closeness they were not ever _inappropriate_ and I do not think the Major would be so improper as to ask before.”

An attempt too easily, if not thoroughly, dismissed by Rachel: “There are some who say she _is_ divorced!”

“No, that is absurd,” Lydia argued, surprising Mary with sense she ought to have known would not persist. “We would have heard and we cannot think so ill of Anna as to believe she would continue as Mrs. Strong. No—but there _are_ some who say she has initiated such proceedings!”

“Then,” Mary tried again, “why would she refuse him?”

Blessed quiet resumed for a full minute. It would not last, heavy as it was with the racing of two minds and the drudging anticipation of the third. Rachel broke it:

“What if—or, there are some who say, she had promised such intention to him, but of late reneged, intending to keep her Selah Strong after all. Perhaps, _they_ say, she has lost confidence in the British, for those that ever believed she’d gained it, considering her family and match.”

Mary gaped, and though it once might have appalled to find herself flushing in defense of Anna, she felt her cheeks warm. “Now that _does_ think too ill of Anna.”

Having decency enough to remain quiet in self-reproach, Rachel did not respond, but Lydia hurried to fill it.

“Of course, _we_ none of us would think so, it is what we have heard—there are some who say it.”

Mary thought that _some_ had an awful lot of nonsense to say, but directed each a gracious smile. There was enough metal in it to signify closure to this topic.

“How fortunate they and we are, to have such trifles to worry over, as so many others suffer.”

They enthused their assent. For one perilous moment it seemed they might force the subject back to the Major, distressed by the possibility of a lesser replacement, but in that Mary could offer solid knowledge from within: he had ensured that the man to whom he sold his commission was of like mind. As Lydia and Rachel prattled onto other matters, Mary strove to offer sufficient responses to be above notice, even as her unhappiness roiled still within her.

She had not fibbed in claiming she approached Anna, but her efforts had been in greater part motivated by self-interest. It remained a novelty but no less true that she _had_ felt worry for Anna, but assuredly, no less blind to the sudden alteration between Anna and the Major, and well privy to the sincerity of their effusion before it, Mary could not conceive of anything tarnishing their regard—not anything less than that which would have repercussions for much beyond Anna’s heart.

Her entreaties were soundly refused, whether for her family or for Abraham, but Anna confessed enough to put a terrible fear in Mary. Only, by her reasoning, there had been weeks of inaction before this most unusual conclusion. When she broached it with Anna, three days after his announcement and four before now, with a fierce and final resentment, Anna declared it to be of little consequence, mattering not.

A finality of little comfort, but the more her mind fussed with it, of some sense. If it had been as she suspected, that the Major then acted in this way and no other implied safety. She sometimes thought she might dare to ask him directly, but tended to conclude such temptation lay rooted in tentative peace of mind and would invite too much.

  


\--

  


One month before Major Hewlett bowed his last to Setauket, he requested time of Richard Woodhull following supper. He closed the door, himself poured their wine, and they sat across from one another. Richard, perplexed and wondering, stared in full incomprehension when Hewlett spoke with plain immediacy.

“I beg your pardon?” Richard asked, polite, even amused in the question. If he heard correctly, then it would be an odd jest, or an unfinished anecdote of another.

“I am resigning my commission,” Hewlett repeated, gentle but no less firm for it. “Well—technically, I am selling it. There could be no question that you, above all, should be first to know. It has never been in my power, Richard, to thank you enough—“

At this progression to gratitude, the absurd reality of it grasped Richard, who interrupted, “What? No. What are you saying? Major, you _cannot_.”

Blinking, Hewlett felt a soft pleasure in his surprise, as to have his intention rejected in such fashion suggested the desire that he stay. 

“I fear that I can and I must,” Hewlett answered. “I am sorry of its necessity and sorry to leave you, my dear friend. Consider this as a bright reflection: I daresay I’ve troubled you enough!”

The intended humor did not strike. Made irritable by his inability to understand it, Richard ventured as he had not yet, despite every trial, every stress, every unreasonable request, every imposition: he retorted without the veneer of polite suggestion, nigh snapping it,

“If it isn’t you, it will be whoever comes after, and so why _shouldn’t_ it be you? Why—why are you doing this thing?”

The tone, not the question, disturbed Hewlett, who excused the former because of his great belief in their friendship—and the perception that its interruption now incited Richard into volatility—which had ever been more strained on his friend’s part. The regard Richard held for Hewlett contained a curious mix of derision and respect, perhaps befitting a man who held contradictions: more a scholar than a soldier, he overcompensated for inexperience with fervor and the book, so paranoid as to dig up gravestones, so gullible as to trust Richard’s son past reason (if with his own intervention to assure it), at once refined (to be susceptible to accusations of delicacy) and hardy (to survive what he had and surface stronger for it). 

This intimate knowledge of the whole of Major Hewlett made his pronouncement an impossibility, beyond conception. With the same sentiment if not the same words as the women later would, he wondered, what could force a man of such dedication to quit now? Driven by the question, if not a little startled himself by his agitation over it, he scoured over the past days, and the weeks beyond them, seeking a spark. There had been no recent letters received of known consequence, though he recalled Hewlett sending one to Edinburgh, he thought little of it, assuming it yet another for his mother. 

As if thus prompted, Hewlett spoke of the family estate, of his brother’s efforts, of his own hopes to unburden his family and keep self-sufficient, of his mother’s age, of the growing and inescapable potential that he might serve as a help to his brother, of—he continued and Richard shook his head. 

With the crawl of time, his black feelings toward Anna Strong had become more resigned than did they abate, and though he largely walled the subject outside his mind, if ever confronted by it, by them, he would need cede that he believed a true and mutual affection between Hewlett and that woman. He could no longer rationally blame Abraham’s proclivities and lasting activities on her influence (however little reason had say in what emotion would keep), and indeed, mostly forgot at present to resent her in his home—truly, in a home inhabited by such turned peoples, he would need resent every party but the one now choosing to extract himself. No, even him, for inviting her—but best to return to the thought just prior, to _every party but_ , and the corruption beneath his roof, whatever his loosening resolve in defining it so.

He waited now for Hewlett to finish, hearing little of those last justifications, before charging it: 

“It is her, isn’t it? Anna Strong.”

Hewlett paled, his jaw opening, and his lips delayed in shaping a stammering protest. The man had ever been all too obvious in his sentiments and intentions, terribly poor at artifice, whether through a lack of natural talent, a want of practice, or the joining of both. To his credit, he rarely attempted it, thinking it beneath integrity. It made him transparent now and Richard thought it a mercy to disallow him whatever feeble thing he might say.

“What did she say to you?” Richard pressed. Hewlett’s mouth pursed shut. 

Leaning with impatience, Richard cast his mind over recent time once more, remembering the day Hewlett spent ill and confined to his bedroom, remembering his dull satisfaction to see less of Hewlett and that woman so paired thereafter, remembering her father, the traces of him in her dark and determined eyes, a memory that stirred bitter embers in him and asked, could she have influenced even this man, the tenor of whose conversation had undergone the slightest of shifts, noticeable only now?

If only by a mind that looked for and perhaps even exaggerated that at which Richard now seized, his conviction entrenched by memory's selection. The manner in which Hewlett related or discussed news of the war, where once he recounted British victory with smug satisfaction and Rebel successes with a dismay that approached baffled petulance, had seemed to alter. With so little else for conversation insofar as timely events, that he should increasingly avoid the topic struck as peculiar. This having begun in increments in the Autumn of the last year, Richard had little attended except to observe Abraham's attempts at navigating the dinner discussion to such become more forceful and his direct inquiries having to soon be abandoned lest he raise even Hewlett's softened suspicions. Richard had allowed the possibility that they had already been incited, pleased to think a little better of his too often misled friend. 

A too generous estimation, he presently found, and dared to incline further, enough to reach and place a tightening hand on Hewlett's wrist.

“She _has_ spoken to you, your countenance exposes it, and so I insist that you not attempt to feign otherwise. Major, I implore you: you must retreat from the obfuscation of emotion, you must remember your reason and duty, and you must not allow her to mislead you to the threshold of this action!”

Something in his speech stiffened Hewlett, but Richard was not yet finished, the adamant heat in his words preventing his attention of the miniscule alterations in the other man: the tightness of his jaw, the tension in his wrist which began to try the solidity of Richard's grip by a small turn, the set of his brow. 

These warnings did not touch Richard as he continued,“However it looked when she leaped from that boat, allow me now to excite your memory, to remind you of what I have long seen in her, the stain of her family which threatens to color you—Major, do not be deceived!”

Whether Richard spoke out of his regard for his friend of approaching four years, or from a virulent and indomitable fury at the very thought of yet another falling to the persuasion of the Strong mind, would have eluded his own certainty, were he to wonder it. He did not, convinced of his position with the former. So resolved in his righteous intentions, Hewlett's response after weathering such a barrage unsteadied him.  


“Deceived?” Hewlett echoed, and Richard knew that tone, that change in voice: hissed in a terrible rumble as he wrenched his wrist free, the slightness of it belying the hard strength of the movement. Richard remembered it, the single moment Hewlett had intimidated, when he found him in his room, deep within his diary and sketches.

“Richard,” Hewlett said, more a growl than an enunciation, “ _permit_ in turn this counsel of mine and ask yourself whether you want to pursue this subject.”

Frozen by both the change in Hewlett, the nature of his words, and the insinuation he could not yet grasp in them, Richard stared, his spine straightening with the subconscious pull of his every inhalation. His lips parted, but only to exhale, his voice swallowed by confusion.

Seeing it, Hewlett elaborated, his fingers spotted white where he clutched his wine glass, “The subject to which I refer is none other than that of _deception_ and just who in this house has _misled_ me, and then, necessarily, all that which must branch from it.”

White, too, showed in Richard: rimming his eyes, draining then filling his cheeks. 

“Ah,” Hewlett smiled, the expression without joy, taut with anger and lined with pain. “may I quote you? 'Your countenance exposes it.' I'd hoped otherwise, but thought you likely too clever for my own shortcomings—so, Richard, shall I insist?”

Without realizing his fall, Richard felt his shoulders meet the back of the chair, the sound of it heavy. His face shuttered as he answered, with a short delay, “I cannot know of what you speak, but whatever you are _implying_ , if you are now asserting against me, in my own home, _accusations_ —“

“Of course not,” Hewlett interposed, his lips still arced in such a shape, but a dull, wet certainty in his eyes. “There is hardly the evidence.”

Agog again, Richard stared, a look which Hewlett returned as they both grasped their glasses. They swilled and sipped at the wine, unblinking and looking, and in near unison, set it down. Dual clinks of glass against wood served as the lone sound in the room, followed shortly by popping from the fire. 

“I ask again,” Hewlett finally ventured, weariness intermingling with the kept vibrato in his voice, “shall I insist?”

As any finding themselves cornered, Richard lashed out, whipping in that familiar direction, “I do not know what she said to you, but—”

“Leave it!” interrupted Hewlett, close to shouting, his eyes darting toward the door before returning to his growl, “Leave her! She spoke only of herself, but do you think me incapable of deducing beyond that, of discovering the pattern once introduced to a part?” 

Richard shook his head, but Hewlett gave him no opportunity to counter, surprising him with a strangled laugh, with his hand flicking up to hover a moment over his eyes, which turned toward the fire, moist and reflective.

“You must have,” he said, low and hoarse, “and perhaps rightly. I have thought so much these last weeks, I have remembered each day, sickened by the exercise and consumed by it, and concluded much, not least of all, what a _fool_ I've been.”

In the quiet that followed that, as Hewlett swallowed, Richard tried, “I don't, I never—“

Hewlett's chin jerked back toward Richard with a violence that stayed him, but it was the content and wretchedness of what he said that broke him: “Must you continue to look down on me?”

Shame blossomed beside guilt in his chest, thickening webs that constrained the nervous, frightened pattering of his heart, reducing it to a dull thudding. Cotton filled his mouth, preventing justification, preventing even a pleading for his family, warped though it was. 

Hewlett looked at him a moment longer before sinking back himself, and every part of him seemed to sink, his eyelids over his eyes, his eyes into their sockets, his head against the cushion. 

“Perhaps,” he began, mild and defeated both, his eyes not yet open. “you might advise me this last time, as much my old friend as this town's magistrate, and _loyal_ to your King.

“If I remain in my position, shall I overlook it? Or do you suppose, if I entreated most stern, Abraham might be persuaded to _stop_?”

Richard felt his heart claw through the webbing and catch in his throat, the direct mention of his son choking him, though he had thought himself long prepared for such a development. 

Slitting open his eyes, Hewlett raised his eyebrows at Richard, requiring an answer. Richard could advance only the shaking of his head.

“Indeed, he must be quite entrenched and quite resolute, if he has done all I've imagined, these last years. So, if he will not stop—”

“ _They_ ,” managed Richard, and there was a ceding disappointment in the further opening of Hewlett's eyes.

“They,” he allowed, “if they will not stop, then they must be hanged, and truly, they must be regardless. Whatever your actual involvement, I expect you and Mrs. Woodhull will be quite safe from conviction, and I shall only have seen to it that the family who made their home so much my own loses husband, father, and son.”

Shifting in his seat, Richard could not yet reclaim more words. Hewlett added, his own flat and empty, “As must be right and just.”

Once, Richard knew, Hewlett would have looked upon the hanging of a spy with a pleasure rooted in that justice, and perhaps in his own role in meting it. The absence of such, while possibly for all within Whitehall, returned Richard's mind to that nettle Hewlett so avoided. It loosened his tongue and made him careless with it, incensed by the corner, by the pathetic dignity by which Hewlett strove to excuse his irrationality. 

“If we are being frank,” he said, “then admit to me that you have no less interest in sparing that woman! Is that not your true motive? What is the difference between staying and overlooking, and leaving and failing to inform whomever follows, a deceit which you clearly must intend? It is not duty—it is cowardice!”

Hewlett cringed, his eyes narrowed for _that woman_ squinting shut, the last the cracking of a lash over his spine, stripping away a neat line of flesh, red exposed beneath, the red of blood and heart. 

“Yes,” he admitted, meeting Richard's eyes with reluctance, “it is cowardice. I am complicit. If I remained, I _could not_ blind myself and not act, whatever the repercussions for myself, having once written to save a spy. Yet, I cannot even bring myself to the precipice of an _attempt_ to write the order, to tell another. 

"I have chosen, instead, to run away.”

His hand found his brow and soon cradled it, and to Richard's eyes, Hewlett looked both much younger, a boy overwhelmed, and terribly older, small and tired and creased, swallowed by a chair colored scarlet by the fire. Richard sought in his mind and in his mouth, searching with his tongue, feeling out any response, any answer, any opinion. He found naught. He could not yet craft his opinion of this, of Major Hewlett and his queer determination, and so could not shape any word but the purposeless. 

The flames crackled, devouring the wood in steady licks, and they finished their wine without syncopation. 

“Come,” Hewlett said as he replaced his glass, “let us part as friends.”

In the exhausted vacancy left by all said and unsaid, there spread in Richard, following the webbing and tearing through it with a gentle weight, sorrow. A sentiment matched by the brightness in Hewlett's eyes. 

Richard nodded and held out his hand. Before grasping it, Hewlett spoke, “I must ask one last favor of you, depending upon that friendship. It is past time, please consider, to dispense with thinking of Anna—of Mrs. Strong as _that woman_. I think it not too much to say that at this juncture, your base for it is precarious. I cannot ask that you shelter her here once I have gone, but I will entreat this: strive to think kindly and so be kind.”

More than a month had passed since he last observed Hewlett and Anna Strong exchange more than the most cursory of courtesies. Richard again stewed in the fog of incomprehension, looking down at where Hewlett, too, had extended his hand, hoping for assent in Richard initiating the shake. If that woman had confessed or been found, the former inexplicable if more probable owing to Hewlett's persistent blindness before, then why had she stayed through the palpable souring of their friendship? It would cast black aspersions in him, the certainty of her unaltered opportunism, and yet more pressing and more revealing was Hewlett's request despite that betrayal. 

Whether Hewlett clung still to obscuring sentiment or Richard had indeed too much distorting prejudice against Anna Strong, he could no longer profess conviction. He might well allow too, in the framing of departure, that his conscience had its own weights and shadows.

Richard took Hewlett's hand. Both grasped firm, shook well, and smiled with a weak but remnant affection.

  


\--

  


Major Hewlett and Magistrate Woodhull shook hands once more, before the gathered majority of Setauket, once Hewlett finished his pronouncement. They spoke to one another in murmurs, their hands fixed still at the other's elbow, before stepping apart. Hewlett exchanged a more distant warmth with Mrs. Woodhull, bid young Thomas to look after the others until Abraham's return from New York City, and looked one last sweep over the town and its residents before mounting his horse. 

In that last regard, many would swear he did not so much cover the entirety of what might be seen, but sought a single location: the entrance to the tavern, its door ajar, a figure in the frame. 

Some would say his gaze lingered. It lingered, yet he did turn, he did mount, he did ride from Setauket, and Major Hewlett did not and would not return.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, so, let's begin with 
> 
> 1) I intend this to be many chapters. I've never tried such before. Wish me luck! This isn't a comment dig, just like... mentally is fine too... 
> 
> 2) You can probably tell I've been reading a disgusting lot of Jane Austen to get a feel for speech and the like. Once I realized how much had bled into it, I decided it was fine for the Prologue, but don't worry, I hope to not be so derivative in the proper body of it.
> 
> 3) WOW LONG PROLOGUE UH honestly I doubt the future chapters will all be as long... 
> 
> 4) As may be incredibly obvious from the premise, this story will have a lot of historical anachronism in relation to Anna Strong. Moreso than even the show. I am and will be trying very hard to be accurate with regard to detail and facts, like I have a stupid number of books on my kindle about Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment and even William Herschel, but my terror of period pieces + the demands of the story will lead to some wrong stuff. This will be especially glaring in chapter one. (I'm going to have to fridge an obvious dude.) Please forgive me.


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